The problem is, of course, that people only fulfil what they assume to be their wish and end up mourning the fact that it was only a brief escape from reality, and they still feel hollow, wanting, yearning for real fulfilment.
The superheroes are a plagiarism of the archetypes they were taken from and reduced to shallow Hollywood storylines, where myth meets science fiction and mixed to a short thrill that subsides as soon as one leaves the cinema. The realism of the pictures is short-lived, and the imagination has been made redundant. There is no fulfilment to be found in such spectacles, just a lot of money.
I don’t think that the “wholeness” achieved with that kind of imagination that is served within a few hours lasts for much longer than that. At least the past re-enactment of ritual has served people for a week and could be repeated yearly. These stories that we consume today are like yesterday’s newspapers that are swept down busy streets by the wind.
I know that I am used to a different kind of Christianity here in Europe, but here it is relatively unresponsive to the appearance of pagan Gods as saviours of the world. It’s “only entertainment” and who cares anyway. The church keeps to the theological discourse, moralizing as much as the audience will allow, although they still watch the congregation slowly dissipate over time. The rampant materialistic atheism tells people that there is no meaning in the world, and no afterlife, so spend your time wisely and don’t fail to have fun.
I even have problems talking to churchgoers about real spiritual subjects, who place their interest in theology firmly on the Sunday of the week. Otherwise, it is nicely stacked on the shelf. There are devotionals perhaps, if it is a godly house, which are read in the morning and forgotten in the evening. The subject of wholeness is too ambivalent for such people, their focus is instead fixed firmly on the pointing finger, failing to follow its aim.
What I’m seeing is that these stories are reiterations of the monomyth. With the passing of the Christian epoch, less and less people are getting the spiritual uplift that comes from contact with numinous archetypes of the collective unconscious. In the modern age the creative arts have taken over this function. And the superhero genre is part of that. When it is effectively done people get spiritually refueled by it. It may not last. But if it gets them inspired enough to go out and run after their ideals for another day, it’s better than nothing, naked drudgery or despair.
I do not think the average church goer realised that they were not just going to church ot listen to the vicar, and sing a few dredful songs, but were actually achieving spiritual uplift from “contact with numinous archetypes of the collective unconscious.” That is thigh slappingly funny.
So which creative art give us spiritual uplift from “contact with numinous archetypes of the collective unconscious.”
I agree with you that there is a potential there. But the aim of the filmmakers isn’t to reiterate the monomyth, but to make a movie that will make money. That is where the potential isn’t realized and the effect fades shortly after the film has ended. I have heard film goers express their awe about how “realistic” it all seemed, and “how did they film that?” I heard the same when I went to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy and had to think about how many hours I spent thinking about the story after reading it, and how often I re-read the story. The films have the effect of glossing over so much that is written, even though I found Peter Jacksons filming excellent. Reading is better than filming, because you have restrictions that, once accepted for printing, a book doesn’t have, and it allows you to go inwards rather than looking at the images projected outwards.
That is what is lacking: The monomyth as the mapping of our mental processes, developing a spiritual story, showing our transcendental potential.
Bob I plan to respond to your post and more detail, but I wanted to mention that I’m started watching videos of Kastrup and I’m finding them interesting. Another guy with videos that are relevant to my interest is cognitive psychologist John Vervaeke who discourses on the meaning crisis.
This was the hypothesis of Joseph Campbell. George Lucas said Campbell influenced his writing of Star Wars. It’s not hard to see the parallels between a mythological hero like Hercules and Superman. Of course for most people superheroes don’t become a full-blown religion. But they are temporarily able to suspend disbelief and enter the story without self-consciousness. This phenomenon seems to be related to participation mystique, or mystical participation, which refers to “the instinctive human tie to symbolic fantasy emanations. This symbolic life precedes or accompanies all mental and intellectual differentiation. The concept is closely tied to that of projection because these contents, which are often mythological motifs, project themselves into situations and objects, including other persons.” (Wiki)
London: You write that one of the most stultifying things about modern psychology is that it’s lost its sense of beauty.
Hillman: Yes, if it ever had one. Beauty has never been an important topic in the writings of the major psychologists. In fact, for Jung, aesthetics is a weak, early stage of development. He follows the Germanic view that ethics is more important than aesthetics, and he draws a stark contrast between the two. Freud may have written about literature a bit, but an aesthetic sensitivity is not part of his psychology.
London: And this has trickled down to therapists today?
Hillman: Yes. Art, for example, becomes “art therapy.” When patients make music, it becomes “music therapy.” When the arts are used for “therapy” in this way, they are degraded to a secondary position.
Beauty is something everybody longs for, needs, and tries to obtain in some way — whether through nature, or a man or a woman, or music, or whatever. The soul yearns for it. Psychology seems to have forgotten that.
I agree with this sentiment in one way, but I have also seen art therapy at work and how it becomes a discovery of art, rather than something that one has tod do because it’s therapy. It is a question of how it is applied, as with many things. One young lady was unsure of what she should do because she’d never had the opportunity to think about art in any way, so she took to filling in mandalas, which are therapeutic for some in themselves. It developed though and she started making her own mandalas, then tried drawing and step by step, she discovered that she had something in her that she hadn’t realised was there.
But I agree that for some therapists, it is just another option, and the concept of beauty isn’t more than a concept. This has, however been a problem in education, which is something that the late Ken Robinson had pointed to in his books about finding one’s element, and how some people were subject to psychiatric treatment and medicines rather than looking for what they lacked, or in essence were. The school system was concepted to provide workers in factories, not help people understand their potential.
People who have no idea about their potential have difficulty becoming whole.
Hillman’s approach to the psyche is radical and therefore vital in my opinion given how fucked up society is today. So he is critical of the way abnormal psychology including Jungian analysts pathologize the phenomena of the soul. This is not to say that within the context of the way psychiatrist practice today are not helpful. I’ve seen cases where art and music therapies provided life-lines for persons in inpatient psychiatric settings. I don’t think Hillman would quibble with that.
I think Hillman envisions taking the soul out of psychiatry all together. I see a continuity between his vision and the anti-psychiatry of people like RF Laing and Thomas Satz. And while they’re affect on the field wasn’t complete, their criticism did hit home and did shake up psychiatric practice and produced much needed change.
So you might see Hillman and the archetypal psychology movement on the left of the center of Jungian psychology. He was critical of what he called the monotheistic tendency of Jung’s theory that individuation was a drive towards wholeness and unity. He emphasizes the polytheistic proclivities of the soul. In society today this is expressed most overtly in the arts. In the modern world, art and music are spiritual or more accurately “soulical” and polytheistic expressions.
We had a different development in Europe, and especially in Germany.
Psychiatric reform in Germany is a process of restructuring psychiatric care and support that continues to this day. Today, the starting point for psychiatric reform in Germany is seen as the Psychiatrie-Enquête (“Report on the State of Psychiatry in the Federal Republic of Germany”) published in 1975.
Since the beginning of the 1970s, psychiatric reforms have been attempted in various European countries and North America. These reform efforts took on the most radical proportions in Italy, where Law 180 (“Legge centottanta”) was passed in 1978, which, among other things, mandated the dissolution of all psychiatric institutions in Italy and called into question psychiatric concepts of mental illness.
The introduction of neuroleptics in the 1950s brought an alternative to previous treatments such as ice baths and electric shocks. At the same time, the anti-psychiatry movement was formed, which fundamentally challenged traditional psychiatric treatment. It was not until the mid-1970s that the crimes committed against mentally ill patients in National Socialist Germany were addressed, among other things in the Psychiatry Inquiry. In the meantime, the forced sterilisations and the murder of mentally ill people in Aktion T4 are particularly well known.
The formation of a lobby for people with mental illness begins. Organisations of those affected and their relatives are formed. Public exchange about illnesses and treatments begins in forums such as psychosis seminars, self-help groups for affected persons and relatives, as well as on the internet and in newspapers. Targeted campaigns for education and against stigmatisation and exclusion of mentally ill people are published. Under the motto “experts from experience”, people with psychiatric experience were used as recovery companions and lecturers.
The representatives of a psychiatric reform in Germany denounced the conditions in the large psychiatric hospitals of the time. The main points of criticism: It was a matter of “exclusion” and “neglect psychiatry” in which catastrophic, inhumane conditions prevailed. Patients were socially isolated, incapacitated and merely kept in custody, sometimes for life, instead of being treated and rehabilitated.
Psychiatriereform – Wikipedia
I discovered Hillman via Thomas Moore, who wrote Care of the Soul in 1992, when I was starting in nursing, which was, to a great deal, Gerontology and Geronto-Psychiatry. Moore’s book took me out of the restrictions of Evangelicalism and opened up a door that I’d been leaning against for some time. I went on to buy several of his books, not least of all Care of the Soul in Medicine in 2010, which was something that inspired me, but also showed me what kind of opposition I was up against in geriatric care. Because I was in management by then, I tried to implement some thoughts into training of staff and in the structure of the houses I worked in. The rhetoric was welcomed, although the mindset was difficult for the staff to adopt. The biggest success I had was with the social workers, who lapped up what I was telling them and tried to implement it. The Quality Control agency didn’t like anything they didn’t suggest themselves.
Of course, I went on to read Hillman and watch his videos, but my idealistic stance was about to backfire on me, when I developed my own mental health issues. I’m sure that many people have tried to implement such ideas, but in Germany we were obsessed with documentation. Nursing teachers were fascinated with the ideas from across the pond, but had things to do…
The United States also went through the process of deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1970s. The results have been mixed. On one hand person’s diagnosis with mental illness live in less restrictive environments. On the other deinstitutionalization resulted in a nationwide increase in homelessness.
A salient feature of the approach to mental illness in America is the right to refuse treatment. This means that people with no insight into their own mental state are free to deny treatment and intervention only occurs when the person becomes an overt threat to themselves or others. The most dramatic consequences of this can be seen in cases where the mentally ill commit mass murder–a problem which is epidemic in the United States.
Going along with this is the underfunding of mental health treatment. The quality of care that people get if they get any is related to what they or their insurance company can pay for. The absence of universal healthcare is a huge factor in this equation in the United States.
The public treatment of mental illness usually consists of little more than psychotropic medication and perfunctory interviews to manage medication intake. The poor usually have no access to those psychotherapies which has been shown to be most efficacious in controlled studies.
I practiced psychotherapy from 1986 to 1992. What I described above was the state of psychiatric care at that time. I don’t see that it is improved significantly since then. Persons with mental illness still make up a large percentage of the people living in the street in the city where I live.
Anyway, mental illness is part of human experience. Part of everyone’s experience to some degree. And insofar as we are spiritual beings mental illness is spiritual. The myth of spirit and demon possession morphed historically into the myth of the medical model. Is the latter better?
To answer one looks to one’s own experience. Or to the experience of mental health clients. Or to the experience of their families friends and work associates. Their understanding of the science varies. But they know their experience.
To me de-pathologizing has the effect of breaking the tight boxes of psychiatric diagnosis and placing them into the bell-shaped curve of human experience where you and I and everyone else is situated. As a wise man once said nothing human is alien to me. Recognition of our common humanity is essential to the experience of a sense of wholeness.
Thomas Moore’s ability to differentiate soulical and spiritual experience phenomenologically is remarkable. I recently enjoyed his book “Soul Mates : Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship”.
Here’s a relevant paragraph from that book:
A soulful relationship offers two difficult challenges: one, to come to know oneself–the ancient Oracle of Apollo; and two, to get to know the deep, often subtle richness in the soul of the other. Giving attention to one side usually helps the other. As you get to know the other deeply, you will discover much about yourself. Especially in moments of conflict and maybe even despair, being open to the demands of a relationship can provide an extraordinary opportunity for self-knowledge. It provides an occasion to glimpse your own soul and notice its longings and its fears. And as you get to know yourself, you can be more accepting and understanding of the others depth of soul.
With the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic the virus has taken the lead. Before the development of modern biological science, infectious agents were viewed as spirits. And still today the “spiritual” mode of being underlies the political. And it divides into conservative and liberal. The phenomenological descriptions of what it’s like to be conservative and what it’s like to be liberal in their diversity and complexities is a conversation that is buried under the hostility political tribes for each other. It’s the conversation we ought to be having here on ILP if we could dial down the violent mode of communication which often prevails here.
Before the pandemic people were already leading super, technology- enhanced lives. Unfortunately most were caught up in the experience to the degree that it was mostly unconscious to them. This is most readily observable in the mass consciousness of the culture war and political divide. There are popular, consciousness-raising self-help products promoted within the mass media and internet. On the Right there are the prosperity gospel and law of attraction memes. On the Left there is the gratitude and the mindfulness movements. I notice that movements on the left don’t necessarily invoke the God symbol.
I recently performed at a $50 a plate public benefit dinner. Before the patrons rose to get their dinner from the buffet, we were instructed to bow our heads and a distinguished gentleman was called on to offer a prayer which he delivered extemporaneously at some length.
Many of those people probably don’t even think of themselves as being especially religious. This wasn’t a church meeting. It was a public meeting of the civic leaders of a small town. I suppose I’m sharing this because some IOP members might be surprised that such culture still exists. For me it is only 46 minutes away.
Oh and by the way in spite of the fact that the number of cases of covid in this area went up by 51% in the past week, nobody wore masks and social distancing was not maintained. Most of the crowd was probably over 60.
Exactly how that group of individuals connects to the media machine I can only guess. They probably have fairly sophisticated technical access. And I can guess the content along the lines of political stereotypy with a p of greater than 0.5. Still I know almost nothing of their interior lives.
The entire field of the social sciences even with it’s extension by the neurosciences in the last few decades, is still in the early stage. There’s still nothing like the consensus that exists in the field of say-- biology. There are widely divergent theories of the place of religion within the evolution of the human species. The relation of depth psychology to evolutionary biology is understood by whom? Peterson is making stabs at it. But there is nothing like a consensus among the experts. The social sciences are still waiting for their Darwin. No vision of wholeness to be seen there.
Yes, this has been something that I also observed. Generally speaking, more people on the left have also been ready to take on a lifestyle that was back to nature, more culturally aware, communal life, often said to be a “hippy” lifestyle, take up the humanities, social work etc. than people on the right. They have been looser in their social bonds, often leaving family to go abroad. More of those on the right were concerned with achieving prosperity, economic stability, and also social stability in churches, associations, controlled neighbourhoods, and weapons. The right has also seen a need to help others become like they are, whether they want it or not.
Of course, there is the discussion about what approach adds more to the prosperity of a country as a whole, and technology has a big role to play in that. Strangely, it was when there was a creative cross-over that computers made a leap ahead. Steve Jobs went from a leftish personality to an abusive dictator once his project started up. Bill Gates was, I think already more on the right when he started up. But the left made selective use of technology, mostly to further creative passions, whereas the right used technology to dominate markets and further their drive for prosperity.
We “heathens” in Europe are seldom confronted with such a display of religiosity. Even events where the church is involved, it is subdued, and the prayers are short. In Catholic federal states in Germany (yes, some are) you might see it more, but again, it is quickly performed. There are Evangelical pockets here and there that I know of, but they are few and far between. However, there the concern is that all are vaccinated that take part or have a recent test, and they were wearing masks up until they were vaccinated. I know this because I was at a birthday party yesterday, where a number of them were from Evangelical circles. Interestingly, alcohol flows freely in such circles.
I think that the country is mostly run by people on the right, whose concern for social sciences is not so pronounced. I have often noticed, when I was amongst managing directors, that my hands on experience with patients and residents of care homes was respected to a certain degree, but only in as much as I was promoting their economic goals. Any social concerns I had were brushed to one side and at best looked at as a means to get a good rating. I think this is also where a cross-over happens (which I wasn’t prepared to do wholly) and people are expected to have different goals the more they are in management.
This way, the neurosciences, amongst others, are following a path to keep the funding they have, and their goals are aligned to the money. There would be a lot to achieve if it were different, but this takes second place to ensuring that funding is available. It is a pragmatic outlook, which I remember being told was necessary for me to “get on” in higher management, and it was all around me. Not only the company I worked for, but also the control authorities, and the political leaders made this clear to me. My concerns for the mental welfare of my staff were subjects that made our talks abrasive, and I was told that “we do enough” and practically told to shut up if I went beyond the socially acceptable degree of concern.
My vision of holistic care for elderly people was also a subject that some teachers taught at nursing schools and specialist social journalists entertained, but which was difficult to transmit amongst management leaders. The subject was made the issue of the person raising it, and I was told to be innovative and find a way to make it economically viable within the available structures. There were enough people who knew that there are problems in elderly care, and this does strain the relations between staff and residents, but it was hushed. My mental health issues were equally hushed and during my absence, I was replaced. Fortunately, because I had been in higher management, I wasn’t pushed fully out straight away, but it was the welfare system of the country that caught me when I was.
Of course, I am very fortunate in that way, but my attempts to provide a service that addresses the problems in that area were a problem for those up top. My concern for my staff, who regarded me more as a counsellor than a manager, was something that I was often told that would “get in my way”… and it did.
Bob–I worked in the health department of the State of Florida for 37 years. The dehumanization of bureaucracy was thoroughly elucidated by the existentialist literature and philosophy of the 20th century. Yet it persists. It is a source of soul fragmentation, the antithesis of wholeness.
Freedom from the tyranny of bureaucracy is a huge thing of the American consciousness. It is the psychic infrastructure that supports resistance to government mandates to quarantine, socially distance, mask wearing, and covid-19 vaccines. The government doesn’t want to help you it merely wants to control you. On the right the primary function of the government is the use of force. The primary motivation for owning guns is to defend yourself against the tyranny of the government.
And white Evangelical Christians make up the largest group of this demographic. I have a close friend who grew up in a Christian fundamentalist household who defines himself, his skepticism and his political philosophy in terms of opposition to his childhood conservative religious. One can’t call oneself an atheist without reference to God.
Intellectual wholeness is coherence. If one defines oneself politically on either side of the divide, one’s political philosophy will be incoherent by virtue of its situated point of view. The goal of objectivity is a transcendent point of view. A view from nowhere would be a view from everywhere. A God’s eye view. Empirical omniscience.
The existentialist knows this is impossible. Yet this is what the quest for knowledge seeks. Nietzsche subsumed it under the will to power. But it also carries the will to Goodness Beauty and Truth. And CG Jung saw it as the engine that drives individuation–the path to wholeness.
Well, nobody can claim that you didn’t persevere. I can’t claim that kind of staying power, however, when I left school, I didn’t have a degree or even a full graduation, so it was an uphill struggle that took longer than for many people. I finally graduated in Germany, and was already 26, had a family and no profession to speak of. I was 38 before I finally trained as a nurse, having worked in industry beforehand doing unskilled labour, driving, and finally becoming a clerk and finally an office manager in a large workshop setting. Interestingly though, I did have a lot of people who were helping me by suggesting books, talking to me about literature, history, and philosophy. It was Erich Fromm who in particular caught my attention and the books listed as sources in the book, “To Have or To Be”, became my reading list.
I can appreciate the struggle you have had, having read Hillman and, of course, many books by Thomas Moore, in which the problems of the American system were portrayed. I found similar but by no means comparable problems here in my field of study. Amongst the people training for Care Management, I found myself to be the best read of all of them, and some were oblivious of Gerontology or Geronto-Psychiatry, although it was the basis for training geriatric nurses. The mention of holistic measures, the consideration of all aspects of a human life, was pushed aside in favour of contemporary measures. Strangely, the person who was most interested in what I had to say was a catholic pastor. An advising psychiatrist also became interested in my attempts to widen the scope of care, and simplify the care planning for people with dementia of various kinds.
This all took a dive when I went into management, despite attempts to increase sensitivity for the needs of the people suffering from various neurological illnesses. The idea that we could help people feel whole again, despite their ailments, help them compensate or cope, was something that I was able to include into the training of staff, with help of the psychiatrist I mentioned. We even planned to write a book together, combining care and medicine in an attempt to push a holistic approach. It didn’t happen unfortunately.
To be honest, knowing the people I know, I’m glad that there is some controlling instance, preventing the stupid behaviour that I’ve experienced. Enlightened scepticism is okay, but through social media there is an increasing number of so-called experts who are manipulating people, causing them to doubt everything. Some of these people are unable to hold a conversation without ending up shouting. I have the feeling that their anxiety is driving them, and that common sense is put aside in many cases. I can’t see a person driven by anxiety has any access to wholeness.
I agree that the identification with one “side of the divide” does put you at a disadvantage. I always have had this problem throughout my life. I remember how a conflict grew in the church about pacifism, saying Jesus was a pacifist. The Evangelicals jumped up and defended the military. I was called into the discussion because (ironically) I was known to have been a soldier, but when I presented both sides of the argument, and pointed out that both have consequences that you have to be aware of, I lost support from both sides.
Empirical omniscience may be impossible, but I believe it is possible to embrace the paradox, if you accept it as such. “For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” It is the struggle we all have, and with which we must cope. It is trust in a guiding hand and the return to self-reflective meditation that helps us achieve a modicum of wholeness.
Interesting that you worked in the gerontology in geronto-psychiatry field. I studied lifespan developmental psychology, community psychology, and cognitive behavioral therapy at the Masters level before I entered the mental health field.
Perhaps you are familiar with Eric Erickson’s theory of adult development. According to him the stages of development and adulthood are intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation and ego integrity versus despair.
The last of these stages may have some relevance to the symbol of wholeness. According to Erickson ego integrity results when a person can look back and accept his or her life as having been good and can acknowledge and accept the self as a totality.
This means being aware of the positive and negative aspects of identity but not being threatened by this knowledge. Jung’s work to help patients become conscious of their Shadow had a similar therapeutic aim. According to Erickson the acceptance of the present self and past life experiences also allows the person who has achieved ego identity to accept the inevitability of death the future holds.
Despair results when the threat of death forces the person to realize that there is no time left to correct past mistakes or present faults. It is manifest as a discontent with life and with the self and a fear of death.
I can imagine a fruitful conversation between CG Jung and Eric Erickson wherein Jung’s concept of individuation is discussed in terms of Erickson’s developmental stages. Each of the eight stages in the life cycle was described by Erickson as a psychosocial crisis: a time when the individual is particularly sensitive or vulnerable to certain developmental issues resulting from the interaction of biological, psychological and social forces characteristic of the period in the life cycle. Jung’s extensive experience and insight into patients who came to him in times of crises plus his own visionary experiences gave him a unique perspective on the interior life of the individual in crisis.
These are all subjects that interested me deeply after finding my footing in Germany and although Ericksons theory wasn’t familiar to me at the time, before our son was born, I had been very busy informing myself about psychosocial development as a preparation for the responsibility of being a father. It is some time ago now, but I remember that there was a similar table listing the various development stages in the books I was reading, and the number was around the same. It stood me in good stead when taking up nursing training and the teacher said she quite enjoyed my interaction.
Of course, the ages are approximate and there is a degree of variation in real life, but I think that we do go through such stages in life. Our son definitely went through a similar development to what Erikson describes and I noticed myself too going through these steps. During training, our professor Erich Grond, also gave us various examples of psychosocial development, but I no longer have his book (which is out of print), so Erikson might have been in there. It does sound familiar.
There are many people who see their lives as unproductive, feel guilty about their past or feel that they have not achieved their life goals, and who will become dissatisfied with life and develop despair, depression, and hopelessness. That is the situation we’re struggling in our societies with, in my experience. But it isn’t the only problem. I was talking to a woman who is entering retirement and she feels like she has had a good life, but is now put on the side-lines, “waiting to die” as she said. Although she had moderate success, she is a singer and musician, has had a successful career in a bank, and has a stable marriage, it hasn’t led to the virtue of wisdom, which enables her to look back on her life with a sense of closure and completeness. I think that she feels like she’s leaving something behind. It is probably a phase that she will overcome, but I hear the same from many people my age, especially men.
I appreciate the fact that we don’t have a continuous state of ego integrity, but experience both ego integrity and despair. It may be that this despair is only temporary and with time she will reflect on her life positively and achieve wisdom. After all, Erikson did say that our lives are characterised by alternating states of integrity and despair that need to be balanced. From my own experience, I have been alternating in the last years of my life quite drastically but feel that I now have achieved a stability that hopefully will last.
The people I had as patients/residents were twenty years older than I am now, and some of them were serene, others were struggling, although they were both in similar states of ailment. Of course, we had many people with dementia, in which the struggle with life has various complications. I had the feeling, when observing the serene and patient people, that they had a stability that was to be revered and supported. Some lived the “inshallah” or “God willing” attitude to the full, even if they couldn’t speak a word. I would say that these people were living a wholeness that is enviable.
I have often asked myself whether the crises that I experienced in the course of my life were “normal”, having often causes that were mostly rooted in my behaviour, which had for some strange reason, changed. I found myself is stages of distress at many times, although I couldn’t explain it to anyone. The strange thing is, that I was known to help others in similar situations. Probably the phrase, “Physician heal thyself!” is applicable to some degree (although I’m no physician). In these stages, I had successes professionally that were unusual, in that my team and I were able to help the healing process even in the case of a stroke, deep needle abscesses and other critical wounds. We were able to calm patients with brain tumours, who were becoming aggressive, and people hallucinating as in the case of Parkinson medication. We got all the “difficult” cases, and it was noted in the town, not just in the Catholic organisation I was working for. One priest actually came to me on my ward and said, “I want the same treatment as my colleague!” who we’d received supposedly bed-ridden, but after a time was able to hold services again and celebrate his sixtieth service anniversary. The second priest’s ailment was a degenerative illness against which we had no remedy.
If I go by Erickson’s stages, it was quite normal to have these crises, which were quite confusing. You tend to think that success in one area is success per se, but that isn’t the case. It is only after accepting that these alternating states of mind are normal and managing to incorporate both aspects in one’s life that a wholeness can take place. That was something I noticed in meditation, which to begin with I was going to give up, until the teacher spoke to me personally and made it clear that this was normal. It is also an aspect of mystical Christianity, but something that is often overlooked in mainstream churches. Evangelical Christians had even suggested exorcism of a kind to cope with such experiences.
It should be something that we are all looking for, in all humbleness …
As Habermas points out there is a dualism between the natural and the cultural sciences. “Whereas the natural in the cultural or hermeneutic sciences are capable of living in a mutually indifferent albeit more hostile than peaceful coexistence, the social sciences must bear the tension of divergent approaches under one roof for in them the very practice of research compels reflection on the relationship between analytic and hermeneutic methodologies.”
People who try to unite the two sciences come under attack from both sides. Although I have to say on ILP the attacks come mostly from the positivistic side.
It is common enough that the “cultural sciences” tend to use hard sciences as their handmaidens. IN the same way that physics uses maths, archaeology can use science in the collection of data, though the product of the labour of archaeology is not scientific. Much the same applies to cultural anthropology. Human geography, sociology etc also can be very empirical and empoy maths and scientific modelling but again the results sought are not science as such.
Big problems occur when the “social sciences” forget this distinction and try to impose their findings as if it were objective truth.
I do not think the average church goer realised that they were not just going to church ot listen to the vicar, and sing a few dredful songs, but were actually achieving spiritual uplift from “contact with numinous archetypes of the collective unconscious.” That is thigh slappingly funny.